NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who drink or use drugs to calm down anxious nerves are at increased risk of developing full-blown substance abuse disorder down the road, Canadian researchers have found.
Their study is the first to try to shed light on a long-standing chicken-or-egg question: Do anxiety-ridden people self-medicate because they are substance abusers or do they become substance abusers because they self-medicate?
Tapping into a national U.S. survey of drinking problems and mental illness, the researchers were able to follow close to 35,000 people over three years.
Of those who had anxiety disorder at the outset of the study and said they self-medicated with alcohol, 13 percent developed alcoholism, Jennifer Robinson and her colleagues at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg report in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Among respondents who didn't self-medicate, only about five percent got hooked on the bottle. The pattern held up for people who used drugs to calm their nerves.
After taking income, age and other factors into consideration, self-medicating people had 2.5 to 5 times the odds of becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs compared to people who stuck with their doctor's prescription.
In theory, a person who self-medicates could be a budding drug abuser without the interviewer having spotted it, so the fin
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